Keywords

1 Introduction

International migration systems are subject to constant directional and numeric shifts. Just within the last 100 years, Latin America has shifted from being a heavily immigrated regionFootnote 1 to in the second half of the twentieth century become a region of emigration, to today once again attracting population. To account for such shifts and direct our attention to the expansion of global capitalism and globalization (Robertson 2003, 2008), related de- and re-territorialized forms of survival and resilience that migrant communities divided by state borders have been able to maintain by developing ‘multi-stranded social relations’ (Basch et al. 1994), a transnationalist perspective has gained force in migration studies.

Much has happened to transnational theorizing since its early and somewhat optimistic inception 20 years ago (Basch et al 1992, 1994; Rouse 1992; Smith 1994; Kearney 1995). Its use (and misuse) has caused critical refinements (e.g. Guarnizo and Smith 1998; Portes et al. 1999; Smith 2000; Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004; Glick Schiller and Faist 2009) and led to new research emphasizing transnational governmentality (e.g. Baker Cristales 2008; Pecoud 2013) and the growing economy and market-based governance structures arising in the enactment and as a result of state efforts to manage migration flows (Hernández-León 2008; Sørensen and Gammeltoft-Hansen 2013). Transnational migration theory has also slipped into migration policy debates, in particular those paying attention to the intersection between migration and development (Sørensen et al 2002; Orozco 2005; Castles and Delgado Weiss 2008; Phillips 2009; Sørensen 2011). Attention to power asymmetries and the fact that transnational incorporation may be the privilege of those migrants who manage to exchange residence for citizenship while others are able to transnationalize little more than their working force (Brotherton and Barrios 2011: 297), have led a new generation of transnational scholarship to question whether transnational spaces are what they once were or have lost terrain to global capitalist economic forces and increasing unequal neoliberal globalization. In the following I situate my discussion in this theoretical ‘aftermath’, paying attention to the effects the Great Recession and related increase in return migration (both ‘voluntary’ and forced) on migrant-sending communities and societies in Latin America.

The following review of Latin American migration and its effect on origin countries is not based on having studied the same national migrant group(s) in the same localities over time, but rather on having followed different geographies of migration to/from the Caribbean in the early 1990s, to/from the United States, to/from Europe, to/from South America during the 2000s, to lately focusing mainly on movements occurring to/from Central America. Each migration flow has had its own particular historical path and has been circumscribed by specific social, economic and geo-political developments. However, to understand how the dual effect of economic recession and stricter migration control regimes affects sending communities in Latin America quite differently, it is useful to draw on migration experiences that not only are different in composition, but also differs in terms of context and timing of their take off. In this way broader generalizations can be avoided.

The chapter is organized in the following way. It begins by retrieving some of the Latin American migration trajectories directed towards the United States and Europe I have studied over the years. It then examines the somewhat taken-for-granted relation between migration and development in much current policy discourse. Following the logic of this discourse the chapter turns to volume: of migrants and of remittances. Directing our attention to the Great Recession and the effects of stricter border regimes and deportations of primarily undocumented migrants to Latin America it is suggested that what “unsettles” the link between migration and development cannot be reduced to cross-country or cross-economy variations. Nor can it be solely attributed to the ways in which toughened migration control regimes and deportations are related to the economic recession. While this obviously is the case, a more interesting question is how historical mobility patterns converge with more recent transformations in the neoliberal political economy and shapes the social organization of Latin American migration as it currently unfolds on the ground.

2 Departure

When I in the early 1990s began to study international migration, my first encounter was with Dominican migrants in New York. Few had sought refuge during the Trujillo dictatorship (1930–1961), more had followed in the turmoil following his overthrow, and the great majority had come in search of work and better living standards during the 1980s and continued to arrive during the 1990s. By then up to one million Dominicans contributed to the latinization of the United States and the transnationalization of Dominican economic, social, political and cultural relations. A few professionals had managed to find occupations according to their skills; others had worked their way up from the garment industry and other factory jobs. Walking the streets of Washington Heights and Dominican neighborhoods in South Bronx, one found hundreds of small and medium sized enterprises, including bodegas or small grocery stores, restaurants, travel agencies (often located next to stores selling over-size suitcases), cab and limousine operations, beauty parlors, botánicas (shops selling religious artifacts and alternative health products), small factories, and financial agencies that were founded and operated by Dominican migrants (Sørensen 1994). These businesses matured during the following decades (Krohn-Hansen 2013).

Like other Latin American migrants of that epoch, Dominicans travelled back and forth with relative ease between New York City and the island. One key mechanism of establishing a transnational community linking New York City to various local communities in the Dominican Republic was the periodic trips small entrepreneurs made to encourage new potential migrant investors and expand their markets. During such journeys, small business owners filled their empty suitcases with inputs needed for business such as garment designs, fabrics, and parts (Portes and Guarnizo 1991). Although on a minor scale, the suitcases of migrant entrepreneurs’ wives and independently traveling women were often filled with fashion clothes, cosmetics, and household appliances that later would form the basis of informal ‘backdoor’ businesses in the Dominican Republic. Income earned through these activities became invested in formalizing the businesses, in financing the migration of other family members, and in transnationalising lives and livelihoods (Sørensen 1998). Newcomers often arrived on tourist visas that subsequently were overstayed. Many managed to legalize an undocumented stay over a 3–5 year period; others to live, study and work without legal documentation. Going from New York to Santo Domingo I once found myself sitting next to a Dominican passenger, travelling on somebody else’s passport, who while click-clacking her rosary and mumbling Santa Marias and Virgin de Altagracias’ to the rattle of the accelerating engines turned to me and said : “I usually fly American Airlines. Contrary to Continental they know that Dominicans travel with many suitcases. We are travelers”.

Migration to the United States was based on social networks. Lack of access to such transnational circuits proved decisive for the migration options at hand. When I later during the 1990s began studying the migration trajectories of Latin American women in Spain, I found that the migration of in particular domestic workers stemming from rural, poorer and ‘darker’ or indigenous social strata of the population was determined by their lack of access to US-bound transnational networks (Sørensen and Stepputat 2001). However, due to Spanish women’s recent entrance on the labor market, labor contracts in domestic service were easy to obtain, and if not readily available before migrating, entrance as tourist and later formalization of migrant status was a possible, if not always easy, way to start new migration projects. Income, whether earned in New York’s thriving business sector or at the bottom of the European labor market – together with other forms of social, cultural and political remittances – appeared to have a tremendous developmental effect on local sending communities (Sørensen 2004).

Intrigued by the knowledge, skills, strategies and tactics that Dominican migrants were mobilizing in order to overcome obstacles put on their border-spanning existence by (relatively relaxed) migration policies in the United States and in Europe, and inspired by emerging transnational deconstructions of prevailing assimilationist approaches, I began referring to them as “natives to transnational space” (Sørensen 1998), and later, with Karen Fog Olwig, coined the term “mobile livelihoods” in an attempt to analytically normalize the behavior of people so adept at migrating that the crossing of a state border not always constituted the most important life experience or context upon which to evaluate their mobility (Olwig and Sørensen 2002). Borders mattered, of course, not least to a new group of returnees increasingly found in countries of origin: the young ‘misbehavers’ who often against their will were sent back by their parents to be re-socialized into traditional Latin American norms for good conduct. Contrary to the small but growing number of young marginalized Dominican men who began to be deported on charges of dealing drugs on the streets of New York – and the young women charged with selling sex in different European cities (at times as victims of human trafficking) – their forced return took place within family networks.

Continuing research travels between Copenhagen, Madrid, Santo Domingo and Lima towards the end of the 1990s, I began noticing Latin American passengers being escorted onboard commercial flights by migration authorities. Migrants were being deported, but in small numbers and with little fuzz. In 1998, traveling towards Peru, two passengers boarded the Madrid- Bogota-Lima flight with police escort. As soon as the police had shown the travelers to their ordinary passenger seats in the back of the aircraft, the officers left. While sharing a few cigarettes (!) in the rear end bar midway over the Atlantic, I learned that they were deported upon an unsuccessful attempt to enter Spain. They had arrived in a group of 12, who all had paid a ‘travel organizer’ around USD 2,500 for the entire arrangement including tickets and paperwork. The remainder of the group passed migration and most likely took up jobs in Madrid’s care and service sector few days upon arrival. The two deportees disembarked in Bogota.

While carrying out a comparative study on Dominican and Colombian migrants in Europe,Footnote 2 Luís E. Guarnizo and I found that many of the Dominican migrants I had interviewed in Spain a decade earlier were still struggling to make ends meet through dead-end jobs in the domestic sector. Many recently arrived Colombians, on the other hand, through their relatively better educational levels, had managed to leave the domestic and other service sectors after 2–3 years. Dominican businesses in Madrid were fewer and smaller in scale than those found in New York, Dominican associations less influential in Dominican and Spanish politics. Colombians, on the other hand, already had established restaurants and other businesses. During interviews Dominicans, to a larger extent than Colombians, maintained that the main purpose of their migration was to build a house in the Dominican Republic, save enough money to start a small business, and then return. And many new houses – either finished ones or still under construction – could be found throughout the Dominican Republic (Sørensen and Guarnizo 2007).Footnote 3 Others were contemplating buying real estate in Spain, not necessarily because they wished to settle for good, but because the booming Spanish economy apparently presented a better investment opportunity. When the bubble burst in 2008, they – like many Bolivian, Ecuadorian and Peruvian migrants – lost years of hard work and sacrifice and were left with debts way beyond the loans originally financing their migration. Faced with a severe Spanish unemployment rates, many saw no other choice than to return empty-handed to Latin America.

Moving to Central America in late 2005 offered an opportunity to observe patterns of international migration from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras when the Great Recession sat in. My pre-recession arrival coincided with the presentation of the first Human Development Report – Una Mirada al Nuevo Nosotros: El Impacto de las Migraciones – that acknowledged the importance of remittances and the emergence of a complex set of social and economic activities that migration contributed to the development of El Salvador (UNDP 2005). The report departed from the new migration-development policy parlor taken up by the World Bank and various International Organizations and argued that the most important resource for development was the country’s mobile population. The analytical lens applied was transnational, state action to make migration work for development was recommended.

Ironically, local efforts to institutionalize transnational governance structures through policies taking the migration-development policy recommendations on board occurred in tandem with growing government unease over rising deportation statistics. Deported migrants no longer disembarked from commercial passenger flights, but arrived – on a daily basis – with their hands plastic flexi handcuffed in planes chartered by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Their arrival remained hidden from the electronic monitors announcing the landing of other passengers in the arrival halls. They carried little if any luggage and – stripped of their remittance potential – were allowed entrance through the back doors only to, hours later, be dumped directly on the street as prime examples of what Bauman as an antidote to celebrated remittance superheroes has termed disposable human waste or rather wasted humans (Bauman 2004).

This rather lengthy retrospective narrative of Latin American migration makes evident that just as migration processes are reversible (Durand and Massey 2010), also social progress obtained through migration can be reversed. The Great Recession increased migrant vulnerability abroad as well as back ‘home’. How, then, are we to make some kind of meaningful sense out of complex, changing, and reversible migration experiences? If the relationship between migration and development is complex and multi-dimensional, how do we (re-)organize the premises on which migration-development policy debates build?

3 Interlude: Considering the Volume of Flows

According to the latest United Nations’ population figures, migrants born in Latin America and the Caribbean represent the second largest regional diaspora group in the world, with 26 million living in North America, 5.4 million living in another Latin American country than that of their birth, and 4.5 million living in Europe (United Nations 2013). Many Latin American migrants remain undocumented. It is commonly estimated that more than 40 % of for example the Central American population living in the US lack legal immigration status whereas another 10 % reside under Temporary Protection Status (Sørensen 2014). Undocumented migration to Europe is far smaller in scale than that to the United States, estimated at 1.9–3.8 million migrants in 2008, compared to over 11 million in the United States at the same time (Morehouse and Blomfield 2011).

Since the 1980s, emigration has been a powerful factor in Latin America’s economic growth, leading some countries to establish policies attempting to reincorporate nationals abroad into the national polity and in other ways leverage migration for development. Mexico with its state remittance supply programs remains the example most often referred to (although problematic to generalize from); another prime example is El Salvador that through a combination of pleas for Temporary Protection Status (TPS) for its citizens in the United States and promotion of migration-development programs has attempted to include migrants in the national polity (Baker-Cristales 2008). Recent shifts from US-bound to cross-Atlantic flows would explain initial increases in remittances to Ecuador; Spanish co-development policies have been decisive for developing migration-development policies. Other states, for example The Dominican Republic, Guatemala and Honduras, have been more reactive, approaching migration-development issues in only limited and diffuse manners (Orozco and Yansura 2013), often driven more by donor interests than by those of local political elites (Sørensen 2013).

Based on purely economistic principles, remittance data suggests that migrants – despite the global financial crisis – continue to provide critical financial support to millions of households across Latin America. After the historic high of nearly USD 65 billion in 2008 and the 15 % drop due to the global financial crisis in 2009, Latin America received a total of USD 61.3 billion in remittances in 2012. The share of remittances from Europe, in particular that from Spain, has started to fall since 2009, a decline that has been countered by a growth in remittances sent from the United States. Economic uncertainty and high unemployment rates among Latin American migrants in Southern Europe continue to affect the level of remittances that migrants are able to mobilize, affecting in particular the Andean region, while improved economic conditions in the United States are believed to explain the ‘back-on-track’ increases in remittances to, for example, Central America (Maldonado and Hayem 2013).

4 Settlement: The Relationship Between Migration and Development

Governments and international organizations construct policy norms and strategies based on a variety of social, economic, and political considerations. When the migration-development debate entered international policy discussion tables in the early 2000s, it did so on the basis of three developments: a spectacular surge in global remittances (that caught the eye of the World Bank and other global financial institutions), a simultaneous decrease in international budgets for development assistance (pressuring international institutions to look for development finance elsewhere), and increased preoccupations with migration pressure on welfare budgets in migrant receiving countries in the global North.Footnote 4 The hard-working migrant, often marginalized in both home and host countries, emerged in the disguise of the ‘migrant superhero’ (Sørensen 2011), and became celebrated as the new development-kid on the block. How did this transformation occur? To address this rather paradoxical situation, let’s turn to the trajectory of the migration-development policy discourse.

The relationship between migration and development can broadly be divided into two strands: One that focuses on development through economic growth and one that from a human development and human rights perspective finds that migration only is likely to foster development when inequality between and within nations is the end result. Despite the lack of consensus on how development is to be understood, in particular whether redistributional justice forms part of the package, migration has by 2014 become firmly established on the global development policy agenda. A common critique of this agenda is that it is driven by the policy interests of Northern governments and international organizations, and that Southern discussion partners rarely have power to influence the setting of principles and priorities but merely are offered to be partners in implementation (Castles and Delgado Wise 2008; Delgado Wise and Covarrubias 2009). However, as increasing numbers of developing countries have begun to see remittances from their long-distance nationals as a significant resource on which to base national development strategies, the critique should also be directed southwards to Latin American countries, where levels of both income and consumption inequality despite rising remittance transfers remain high (Phillips 2009; Bastia 2011).

From an economic development perspective the range of impacts migration can have on development in migrant-sending countries is often summed up by reference to the ‘3 Rs’ of Recruitment, Remittances and Returns. Recruitment refers to the importance of assessing who migrates, if they are low skilled and unemployed rather than highly educated and needed on the local labor market (contribute to brain-drain). Remittances refer to financial transfers sent by migrants, their volume and impact on local spending and investment. Returns refer to whether returning migrants bring new technologies and acquired skills, whether they remain to foster development in the country of origin, return to retire, or continue to circulate. The relationship between the three ‘Rs’ varies which is why the link between migration and development remains uncertain and unsettled (Papademetriou and Martin 1991; Martin et al 2006).

Another letter combination highlighting the relation between transnationalism and economic development is provided by the additional ‘5 Ts’. Here it is suggested that migrant mobility contributes to foster growth in the areas of Transportation (migrant demand for travel services), Tourism (migrant spending during occasional home visits), Telecommunication (the phone calls exchanged between migrants and their loved ones left behind), Trade (migrant consumption of ‘nostalgic’ home country goods that may eventually introduce these products to a larger market of consumers), and Transfer services (of remittances and Home-Town Association donations) (Orozco 2005). The economic influence of the transnationalization of Dominican lives and livelihoods during the 1980s and 1990s provides a good example of developmental effects beyond the mere transfer of remittances.

Despite the economic downturn of the global economy, a recent World Bank report concludes that remittances have reduced the share of poor people in developing countries. Cross-country analysis shows significant poverty reduction effects of remittances, e.g. that a 10 % increase in per capita official remittances may lead to a 3.5 % decline in the share of poor people. Remittances are associated with increased household investments in education, entrepreneurship, and health that all are expected to have a high social return in most circumstances. Pointing to studies based on household surveys in El Salvador it is found that children of remittance recipient households have a lower school drop-out ratio and that these households spend more on private tuition for their children. Children in remittance receiving households may have higher birth weight, reflecting that remittances enable households to afford better health care. In other cases remittances provide capital to small, credit-constrained entrepreneurs (World Bank 2013).

Based on such assessments the International Organization for Migration’s (IOM) most recent report finds supportive evidence that human mobility substantially contributes to progress for achieving most of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) (Laczko and Brian 2013). However, a critical human development perspective may find that even when remittances have a positive effect on poverty reduction and economic growth, the impact is often modest, the redistributive effect may be lacking, and in the cases where remittances continue to flow during economic crisis, their steady flow cannot substitute for sound public policies (Blossier 2010). There is therefore good reason for critically questioning the monetarizing and instrumentalizing bias surrounding the production of knowledge about remittances. As coined by José Luís Rocha, too much focus on the financial aspects of remittances easily ignores the human development aspects of the social and patriarchal relationships remittances destroy or build, the family micro-policy they determine, and the state reduction they encourage, thereby sidestepping any mention of the political and socioeconomic conflicts of the societies where the remittances end up (Rocha 2008). Additionally, critical analysis of policy discourse may reveal how remittance debates more often than not reflect a sending-state interest in capturing and utilizing this source of foreign currency, pretty much in the same way as a too narrow focus on risk and vulnerability echoes receiving states’ efforts to control or manage migration (Hernández-León 2008).

In a global context of state withdrawal from providing public services, policy attempts to govern mobility for the benefit of development could be seen as reluctance to seriously approach global inequality and change status quo.

As access to mobility (and protection of continued mobility opportunities) is a fundamental premise for nurturing the development potential of migration (Sørensen et al. 2002), it should not require much mathematical skills to figure out that changes in mobility flows will have an effect on individual migrants, their families, and, indeed, on entire communities. And the collateral consequences of massive return are indeed causing serious problems in many Latin American migrant sending countries, first and foremost through the matter of lost remittances. For families that have come to depend on remittances, deportation can be a financial catastrophe. In particular in those instances where migration is based on debt and the loans have not been repaid. In situations where economic recession is accompanied by mass-deportations – or conflict resolution by large scale repatriation – remittances not only diminish, but more pressure on scarce or unevenly distributed resources almost certainly will occur, raising the potential for social and political instability.

So, with due respect for migration’s complex and multidirectional relationship to development, I suggest that the three Rs of recruitment, remittances and return are evaluated against changes in mobility patterns and migration control dynamics following the global financial crisis. Crisis rhetoric –whether related to economic downturn, unmanaged migration or border security – appears to justify harsher mobility policy discourses and stricter migration control measures. In the United States as well as in the European Union migration management is targeting irregular migrants and instituting new forms of governing movement and people hereby increasing migrant vulnerability. To circumvent new state processes of governing mobility, migrants have come to rely on new recruitment processes, remittances are increasingly spent on repaying debts financing undocumented travel arrangements, and increasingly return is occurring in the form of deportation. These competing trends suggest adding what I term the three Ds of Danger, Debt and Deportation to the analysis of migration’s developmental effect on Latin America.

5 Involuntary Homecoming: On Dangers, Debt and Deportations

Europe’s economic crisis is said to reverse migration between Europe and Latin America which according to some sources once again has become a major destination for young, jobless Europeans. To escape the Great European Recession, the Portuguese go to Brazil, the Spanish to Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. Mexico is another popular destination for these so-called European migrants, who nevertheless often are Europeans with dual nationality and descendants of former Latin American migrants to Europe (Córdova Alcaraz 2012). For example, in 2011 only 62,000 of the 500,000 emigrant leaving Spain were born there, whereas at least 100,000 were Latin Americans from primarily Ecuador, Bolivia, Colombia, Argentine, Paraguay and Peru (Laczko and Brian 2013).

But the reverse flow cannot be attributed to migratory processes’ reversible character only (Durand and Massey 2010). From 2008 to the present, more than 1.9 million people have been deported from the United States, the overwhelming majority of Latin American (Mexican and Central American) origin.Footnote 5 In 2013, ICE carried out a total of 368,644 ‘removals’ of which 235,093 were deported upon being apprehended along the border while attempting to enter the United States; the remaining 133,551 involved individuals apprehended in the interior of the country (ICE 2014). Whereas the total represented a 10 % drop from the previous year (and was the first time deportation rates fell since President Obama took office in 2008), some nationalities experienced considerable increase in their deportation rates. The number of deported Guatemalans, for example, grew from approximately 30,000 in 2011, 45,000 in 2012, to almost 48,000 in 2013. Hondurans experienced a similar growth, from approximately 22,000 in 2011, 32,000 in 2012 to 37,000 in 2013.Footnote 6

Deportations from the United States began several years prior to the economic crisis and should perhaps from a strictly legal standpoint be attributed to the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) signed into law in 1996, and to the securitization of migration policy following the terrorist attack in 2001. In the case of Europe, deportation is more directly attributable to the conjunction of the economic crisis and stricter European Union border control following the implementation of the 2008 EU Return Directive.Footnote 7 When originally agreed upon, Spanish Vice President Fernandez de la Vega assured Latin American migrants and authorities that the Directive would not lead to deportation as Spanish migration norms would give preferential treatment to Latin-Americans. But already in 2010, Spain deported around 30,000 undocumented Latin American migrants while around 7,500 were refused admission in Madrid’s Barajas Airport.Footnote 8 The following year the level of deportation and border apprehension increased 4 %.Footnote 9 In addition to high unemployment rates fear of deportation provided yet another push for some Latin American migrants in Spain to leave on their own account. Among the circumstances mentioned “fear of immigration measures that might be taken by the new centre-right People’s Party (PP) government” has been mentioned.Footnote 10

Since Dominicans and other Latin American migrants began to direct their hopes of better futures to the United States, Spain, and other prospering economies in the global north, transnational resilience has diverted into increased vulnerability for those who didn’t manage to cross or legalize their migration status before a dramatic intensification and diversification of migration control strategies were introduced, rendering the developmentalization of migration policy discourse somewhat redundant. This vulnerability is further exacerbated by exposure to danger, debt and deportation.

Restrictive migration control policies constitute a key factor in increasing the risk associated with migration. By severely limiting access to regular forms of migration, prospective migrants are forced into the arms of recruiters operating at various levels of (in)formality and (il)legality. Social network driven coyote or migrant smuggling arrangements have increasingly been taken over by organized criminal networks that now control many of the undocumented routes towards the United States and, even if to a lesser extent, towards Europe. The dangers migrants face en route include extortion, sexual violence, kidnapping, abuse of authority, detention and extortion by authorities as well as private agents (security companies, transportation companies, organized crime and gang members). The ransom demanded for letting free kidnapped migrants range between USD 1,000 and 5,000 (Córdova Alcaraz 2012). Organized crime has in several instances been found to act in complicity with government agencies at points of arrival and departure. In Guatemala and Peru, for example, migration authorities are believed to be among the most corrupt state actors making huge profits on migrant extortion and smuggling. Corrupt migration officials are allegedly playing an integral part by, in the words of Isabel Rosales Sandoval “greasing the wheels of the migration industry through corruption (Rosales Sandoval 2013: 215). In Peru widespread corruption within the General Directorate for Migration and Naturalization has played a similar role (Berg and Tamagno 2013).

The hardening of US and European immigration policies has elevated the power of Northern governments to arrest, detain, and ultimately deport undocumented migrants. As discussed above, this has led to increased deportation, in the US case strategically referred to as removals. Behind the mere numbers, the deportees consist of a diverse population of migrants, spanning settled migrants who have lived and worked for years abroad to new arrivals apprehended during a first attempted unauthorized entry. The increase in deportation has led migration scholars to focus attention on deportation, deportability and deportees (see e.g. De Genova and Peutz 2010; Juby and Kaplan 2011; Golash-Boza and Hondagneu-Sotelo 2013). In these studies deportation is examined as an increasingly global mechanism of state control, deportability (the protracted possibility of being deported) as the real effect of internalized migration policies and practices, and deportees as members of a new global diaspora consisting of “people who had to leave one home only to be forcibly removed, often years later, from another” (Kanstroom 2012: ix). Some attention has been paid to the effects of mass deportations on the migrants sending countries, for example by Hagan et al. (2011) who indicates that deportation produces several negative effects. These include first the termination of the ability to send remittances upon deportation, second the additional pressures on local labor markets with high unemployment rates, and third the exportation of gang affiliation, adding yet another level of social problems to poor and overburdened communities.

The costs involved and debts incurred to finance mobility across ever more policed borders are seldom taken into account in analyses of migration’s effect on home country economies. However, migration is increasingly a process that runs on debt, with migrants and families indebting themselves in ways that many are unable to repay, resulting in the loss of mortgaged homes and productive assets. This is in particular the case for marginalized sectors of Latin America’s population who embark on migration without access to pre-recession transnational social networks. While studying a migrant-sending highland community in northern Guatemala, David Stoll found that 75 % of the surveyed migrants households in lack of access to other means had lend money on property titles. In a context where many get by on USD 1,500 a year, the average debt reported by migrant households amounted to USD 16,000. In this particular case migrants were being pulled by promises of higher wages and pushed by early access to micro credit that became invested in undocumented journeys to the US (Stoll 2010). Studying similar processes in both Guatemala and Honduras I have met several undocumented migrants who in lack of other opportunities took loans with local loan sharks, at times involved with larger organized criminal networks, capable and willing to threaten those unable to pay in order to get the rest under their control (Sørensen 2011, 2013). Similar patterns are reported elsewhere in Latin America. In Ecuador unscrupulous loan sharks have for years charged exorbitant interest fees for the loans migrants take to pay human smugglers for their passage (Wells 2013). Criticizing the migration-development parlor of international institutions and home governments, Stoll asks if migration in reality sucks more value from the sending communities than it returns? I for my part insist that remittance statistics seriously suffers from over-reporting by neither subtracting the money used to repay the cost of the journey nor the reverse money flows sent by families to migrants in prolonged situations of unemployment or transferred to pay the ransom for those abducted on the way.

Deportation policy undermines long-standing family reunification principles and poses dire social, economic and psychological costs for deportees and their families (Hagan et al. 2008). The threat of deportation is particularly poignant for families of mixed status (Brabeck et al. 2011), who in the incidence of deportation of one or more family members become subjected to the disruption of family ties, now in the opposite direction. In the case of the Dominican Republic, Kanstroom (2012) has pointed to the fact that hardly any attention has been paid to the sending countries that must process and repatriate ever-increasing numbers of new diasporas of deportees, who often have stronger ties to their former communities abroad than to those to which they are forcibly removed.

Turning our gaze to the effects of deportation on migrant-sending countries, deported Latin American migrants often arrive from countries that have embraced migration-development rhetoric and implemented out-reach programs to incorporate their citizens abroad, but lack effective state programs for reception and integration of deported nationals. To the deported migrant, deportation represents a personal and familial catastrophe. To the migrant sending state, the deportee represents a distortion of the migration-development logic. Stripped of his or her remittance capacity, the “migrant hero” of the remittance dependent nation so to speak becomes “deportee trash” overnight (Sørensen 2011). The disposability of deportees is nowhere as apparent as in the deportee reception areas of the International Airports in countries such as the Dominican Republic, Guatemala and Honduras where deported migrants in the best of cases are treated as vulnerable nationals in need of charitable assistance (a phone call, a bus ride, a health check), in other cases as criminals not worthy of national incorporation. When such programs exist, they are generally financed by foreign donors, not national budgets.

Brotherton and Barrios (2011) describe the experience of social displacement and stigmatization that deported Dominican migrants face when touching ground on the island, often after many years abroad, as being essentially removed for a third time from a settled environment. The first displacement was their initial migration, often decided by their parents. The second was their apprehension and detention in the United States, and the third their forcible repatriation to the Dominican Republic. In the case of Central Americans, but also pertaining to e.g. Peruvians and Colombians, the displacement logic may be linked to historical experiences of being forcibly displaced by civil war, either internally or to neighboring countries. When I in Guatemala in 2012 interviewed deportees after a larger immigration raid in Postville Iowa, many compared their apprehension, detention and deportation to what happened to them or fellow villagers during the Guatemalan civil war. Just like then, people were forcibly dislocated, just like then some disappeared along the way. Comparing across cases, however, both Dominican and Central American deportees experienced to return to situations circumscribed by a lack of rights, a lack of access to work and educational opportunities, and a lack of safety and security. They had embarked on migration after restrictive migration policies were introduced, arrived to the U.S. or Europe just as the financial crisis sat in, and contrary to a positive recruitment-remittances-return path followed by earlier migrants, their vulnerability had been exacerbated by the dangers related to having to travel in undocumented and dangerous ways, facilitated by indebting themselves and their families, and, upon a deported return, finding themselves further dislocated from the promise of development through migration.

6 Concluding Remarks

Who wants yet another confirmation that those transnational spaces are not what they once were and that the balance of class forces in the wake of neoliberal political, economic and criminal justice doctrines and in the midst of the world’s crisis-ridden financialization have ensured that their capacity to labor has become obsolete? (Brotherton and Barrios 2011: 297).

As the global economy undergoes profound restructuring, migration policy regimes aspire to ever stricter control measures, and undocumented migration become criminalized I note that not only migratory processes, but also social progress obtained through migration, are reversible. The contradiction between the promises of overcoming poverty and solving national development problems by remittances and how difficult an endeavor migration has become to large segments of Latin American populations reflects the tension between neoliberal development discourse (based on free mobility of capital and goods) and migration policy (based on control of human mobility).

In parallel with the Great Recession, new migration management objectives have been put in place. These encompass “the double aspiration of strictly controlling human mobility” while organizing it in “ways that make it compatible with a number of other objectives pursued by both state and non-state actors”, such as e.g. the recruitment of workers or the development of migrant producing countries (Pecoud 2013: 1–2). The disciplining of mobility is international in scope and involves agreements between states on migration related topics, such as a willingness to take back deported migration (readmission agreements) in exchange for concessions in other areas such as development aid, preferential trade arrangements or quotas for circular migration and temporary labor migration programs (TLMPs). In Latin America – as in other migrant-sending regions – migration-development policy discourse is contributing to the disciplining of both migrants and migrant sending states. The normative rationale goes as follows: Migrants should only travel with permission, be hard-working, send remittances, invest productively and return with savings large enough to provide for themselves and their families. Migrant-sending states should ensure that only those permitted mobility are allowed to leave the country and accept that circular or temporary migration are what allow migrant-receiving states to regulate their labor markets in tune with shifting economic situations. While migrant-sending Latin American governments throughout the 1990s and early 2000s had some success in subjecting their transnational populations to transnational governmentality by promising the incorporation of migrants living abroad into the national polity (Baker-Cristales 2008), the neglect experienced by other migrants stepping off the deportation flights in the countries they supposedly ‘belong to’ somehow subverts the myth of transnational inclusion. The limits to trans-territorial nation-state building become apparent when the agenda for neoliberal, transnational governmentality (understood as restrictive migration policy and rigid enforcement action) is firmly set by migrant-receiving states in North America and Europe. Under such conditions, the effect of migration on development may rest less on Latin American states’ willingness to commodify their population (as migrant workers) and more on their ability to stall the deportations (Sørensen 2014).

In contrast to the constant collection and discussion of data on remittances, international organizations and fora for discussing the entanglement of migration and development have been relatively reluctant to quantify and qualify the human costs of deportations for the migrants involved as well as the societal costs for migrant-sending countries experiencing high deportation rates. Some concern has been raised. During the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) in Manila in 2008, for example, the institutionalization of TLMPs was criticized for creating a second class of marginalized workers, allowing employers to exploit migrant workers, and create a situation in which migrants bear the costs of international migration. It was mentioned that “developmental impacts” of migration should be measured according to 4 Rs (and not only 3), adding (migrants’) rights to recruitment, remittances and returns.Footnote 11 Rights were understood as rights to human development. As discussed throughout this chapter, however, a human development perspective would maintain that development through migration only is likely to occur as long as migrants are secured the right to mobility. Therefore, policy discussions around the effects of migration on development will need to address the new realities of tightened migration control regimes and the effects of Danger, Debt and Deportation on migrant sending developing countries.

Discussing these issues in a Latin American context I cannot but end this chapter by relating remittances to other money flows and potentially productive labor to unproductive activities. In the first case, and relating to Central America only, USAid provided approximately $243 million in development assistance to Central America in 2011. ICE spent $132.36 million on removal flights in 2010 and had spent $73.22 million through May 31, 2011. The same year the US Department of Homeland Security spent approximately $1 billion on apprehending, detaining and deporting 76,000 Central American migrants.Footnote 12 One can only imagine the ‘developmental effect’ these enormous sums could have had, had they been invested in the creation of decent employment in the countries of origin. In the second case, and of relevance to both receiving and sending countries, one could consider the number of potentially productive labor hours lost in unproductive activities such as deporting undocumented migrants and in the incommensurable cost of the lives lost at the borders dividing the ‘developing’ and the ‘developed’ world. Considering the range of issues confronting present-day migrants should remind us all that although neoliberalism in principle allows for the exercise of migrant entrepreneurship (as happened with Dominican transnationals in the 1980s and 1990s), the current limitations put on human mobility reverses taken-for-granted paths of the migration-development nexus, and, in addition, creates further global inequalities that not only are unsustainable but also contradictory to all that policy talk about ending global poverty by supporting democratization and respecting human rights.